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Semalt Expert Describes The 3 Pillars Of SEO



Many people think that SEO is a kind of black magic that only a few can practice... And yet, positioning a blog or a website can be as simple as having a good understanding of the 3 basic pillars on which it rests.

This is what we want to explain to you through this article. All you have to do is read and learn.

Indeed, there are more than 500 factors that influence the positioning of a web page. There has always been an attempt to identify them, to order them and even to classify them by many professionals in the sector.

The objective of this post is to review the most relevant factors of the 3 pillars of SEO, and for that, we will start with the 2 classics and leave the more innovative and modern ones until the end. Furthermore, to achieve more success in your SEO process, we invite you to discover the best all-in-one SEO tool, the SEO Personal Dashboard.

On-Page SEO



On-Page SEO refers to all elements related to the content of the page itself.

The main function of On-Page SEO is to tell Google what content you offer and what keywords you want to rank for. There are dozens of factors in On-Page SEO. We will now see its most important factors.

Title

Also known as the "meta title", this is the <title> tag located inside the <head> of your website. It should be brief, preferably no more than 10 words, and it can be aggressive, meaning it can clearly state what you want to position.

For large projects, which aspire to stand out among users, it is advisable to include a reference to the brand or the name of the portal, which works as a reinforcement of the brand and thus improves the response of users (we will see later).

It is therefore common to combine branded keywords in the title, being preferable to leave the brand for the final part, so that Google gives more relevance to the keyword.

As usual, to make sure you select the right keywords to boost your site, use a powerful SEO tool such as the DSD.

Meta Description

This is the text that Google usually displays as a description when it shows your page in its results. You must describe your product or content in 156 characters maximum (if you exceed them, this text will appear trimmed).

This text should not be aggressive and should be user-centric. It should be understood as a marketing tool that encourages clicks on your result, but not as a pure SEO tool (in the classic sense of including only keywords).

As you can see, it's important to try to convince people to click on your site as soon as it appears in the search results, but not to be obsessed with writing an unreadable collection of keywords as it was done years ago.

URL or slug

The URL is also very important. We also need to indicate what product, content or service we offer.

The part that follows the domain (after the slash /) is called a slug. It must contain only alphanumeric characters and clearly describe the target keyword.

Example: https://semalt.com/dedicated-seo-dashboard. 

H1

This tag serves as a visible title of the content. Usually at the top of the page or section. It must therefore indicate the main keyword of the content, which usually coincides with its title.

Content

Content is considered both as a factor on the page and as a factor of response from the user. In terms of on-page SEO, what you need to know is that if you have duplicate, empty or poor quality content, you need to hide it from the search engine to avoid penalties.

This can be done with the robots meta tag with the code: <meta name = "robots" content = "noindex, follow" /> . By using the value "noindex", we tell search engines not to index the content of this page. By using "follow", we tell them that the links need them to transmit strength.

Bad content is more common than we think. You must therefore take care of it to avoid the consequences that will result.

Internal links

The links between the sections of our own page distribute the strength to the whole web. All the sections we want to improve must be linked to the rest of the domain.

The most common way to do this is to use the top or side menus.

Creating links



This is the second of the pillars of classic SEO and consists of getting inbound links to your page to give it strength.

We can apply different strategies to obtain links, which are generally differentiated according to their aggressiveness, that is, according to the naturalness with which these links are made. Each one has its risks and benefits.

In this article we will describe the factors that you should take into account to make a link building without risks, that is, not very aggressive. 

Anchors

Anchors are the text of a link and Google takes them into account to understand the content it points to. Following this idea, in the past, it was common to use anchors with exact keywords to condition Google. Nowadays, this is risky because it is not very natural.

So anchors should be as varied as possible, if you want to follow a safe link-building strategy, try to have at least half of your anchors to be natural. This means that some should be tagged or URL, others can include keywords and some should use unrelated words.

As you can see, the goal is to vary the anchor by combining keywords with natural text.

IP, network and origin

It is also necessary to vary the origin of the links as much as possible and avoid receiving too many close links. By "close" we refer mainly to links of the same IP or C class. We should not abuse links like this.

If they come from another IP but the same network, we can also have problems, again, if we abuse them. The clearest cases are the origins that share Adsense or Analytics, although there are other examples, such as the same Whois (owner) or that the domains are in turn linked to each other.

Whatever the reason for the relationship between the 2 domains, you should look for maximum variety between the origins of the links.

Theme

Links from portals of the same theme (or similar) offer 2 advantages: contextualization and greater naturalness. We should look for the majority of links like this.

If at least 50% of the links come from a portal of the same theme, it will be much less likely that Google penalizes us.

User response



User response basically refers to how a user responds to our page and is the key to understanding modern SEO. This is our third pillar. 

To get good ratings from Google, we need to look for 3 goals: to make:
These goals are specified with the following SEO factors or metrics:

CTR

This is the most important one. We must keep in mind that the main tool Google uses to measure user response to a page is its own search engine and CTR is its best metric.

CTR is the rate of clicks a result receives in the SERPs. If the CTR is high, your page traffic will increase. If it is low, it will decrease.

It is important to understand that the CTR corresponds to the final visits (clicks), i.e. no return. If a user enters your page from Google and comes back a few seconds later to Google to get another result, it will hurt your ranking.

This helps us understand the importance of the meta description explained earlier. CTR encompasses several other factors, but we will discuss them separately.

Prestige brand

More and more, big brands are positioning themselves above small portals. This has various explanations and reasons, but one of them is user response and CTR.

Big brands get more clicks than unknown brands. When faced with a search on SEO, many users choose Semalt from the list of results. Unknown portals will have a harder time receiving that click, and for that reason, the prestige or recognition of the brand greatly influences the SEO.

Persistence

Again, time spent on your page is related to CTR.

The more time and interaction our users spend on our pages, the better the user response.

This affects both visits from Google (CTR) and those from other sources, social or direct.

Bounce rate



The bounce rate is the number of users who leave our page as soon as they enter it. Naturally, we should try to keep it minimal.

Loyal users

If Google detects recurring visits, this will be a very good indicator for it. Pages with loyal users (like big brands) will be ranked higher than pages without user feedback.

Conclusion

We have seen some of the most important elements of SEO and each of its 3 pillars. Every time we design our strategy, we need to keep them in mind.

One way to do this is to start with user response, designing our portal and choosing our content to have a high user response and, if possible, some brand recognition.

Secondly, we need to do the on-page review of the page, making sure to tell Google what content we offer and to distribute the strength to all the objectives of the portal.

Finally, in the link-building phase, we must enhance the portal, trying not to take risks. Whatever our strategy is, if we follow these 3 guidelines, we will have a better chance of achieving our objectives. In addition, it is essential to choose a better SEO tool such as the SEO Personal Dashboard to accompany us throughout the process.